Cisco Unveils Mega Chip for New Network Demands

Semiconductors continue to advance, as a slew of announcements by Intel and Apple’s new A7 processor showed this week. But don’t forget about Cisco Systems.

The biggest provider of routing and switching systems has long retained the capability to design specialized processors for its hardware, as well as turn to off-the-shelf chips from commercial suppliers where that makes the most sense. Now Cisco designers have come up with another singular piece of home-grown silicon.

It’s a new product line called the nPower, and Cisco says the chips can pump as much as 400 gigabits of data per second. By contrast, the company’s prior technology could handle 140 gigabits and required more than one chip, Cisco says. The new capacity translates into hundreds of millions of transactions per second.

To what end? Of course, computer and smartphone users will continue to watch more YouTube videos and the like. But Surya Panditi, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of engineering, says a key driver for the technology is a coming change in the nature of network traffic.

Where most bits sent today result from human action–sending an email or calling up a Web page, for instance–many of the future signals traversing the Net will instead reflect “events,” as devices notice things happening and respond by communicating with other devices or people, Panditi says.

Think of an alert generated when two smartphones come into proximity with each other, or a person with a Bluetooth-equipped smartwatch walks into a store with certain kinds of sensors. “It’s not just machine-to-machine or people-to-people,” Panditi says.

As a result, communications carriers that designed their networks for today’s traffic will need not just greater capacity but more flexible switching systems that can be adjusted to handle the growth of “event-driven” traffic, he says. The nPower chip line was designed to handle the variety, Cisco says.

The first model in the new chip family, called the X1, is a pretty complicated piece of engineering. It has four billion transistors, 336 specialized processor cores, and required about 18 months of labor, says Nikhil Jayaram, a Cisco engineering vice president.

Cisco isn’t yet disclosing which of its systems will use the new chip or when. “This is going into some new platforms and some existing platforms,” Panditi says.